


you’ll be home again when you make a new one

by choomchoom



Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: F/F, Fluff, Future Fic, Gen, Multi, Post-Season/Series 05, Reunions, domestic life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-18
Updated: 2020-07-18
Packaged: 2021-03-05 06:26:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,203
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25359913
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/choomchoom/pseuds/choomchoom
Summary: Adora and Catra are visiting Scorpia in what used to be the Fright Zone when they run (quite literally) into Kyle. He invites them over for lunch.
Relationships: Adora & Catra & Kyle & Lonnie & Rogelio (She-Ra), Adora/Catra (She-Ra), Kyle/Rogelio (She-Ra), not much romance but it’s there
Comments: 9
Kudos: 195





	you’ll be home again when you make a new one

**Author's Note:**

> What can I say but that it’s fun to write about awkward reunions between characters who shared a room for their entire terrible childhood and later get a chance to relearn how to know each other.

“You can stop now. You’ll be in Bright Moon for the Council meeting in like a week.”

“Oh, so you’ll let me hug you all I want during the Council session?”

“Within _reason_ , at least.”

Laughing, Scorpia finally releases Catra from her second goodbye hug and Catra steps back towards Adora, who’s waiting by the entrance. The Aridia castle is at the edge of the former Fright Zone, but most of the detritus of the Horde is gone now. In its place are huts and trees and farms, the land so flat Adora can see for miles. 

Still, somehow, naturally, Adora runs directly into the chest of a man entering the castle just as she turns around to leave. He pinwheels his hands to keep his balance and falls down anyway, spreading the papers he was holding over an impressive percentage of the floor.

She’s about to apologize for running into him when she finally catches sight of his face. “ _Kyle?”_

“The one and only,” Kyle, now nearly a head taller than Adora, says with a smile as he picks himself up and then reaches down to gather his papers. 

“Kyle’s my prime consultant on farms in Aridia,” Scorpia says, trying to pick up one of Kyle’s notebooks and eventually kicking it toward him instead. 

Catra hasn’t said anything, and when Adora glances at her, she’s looking at Adora with a familiar expression of keen discomfort. Adora can empathize - it’s not like she didn’t intellectually understand that Kyle’s been out there somewhere, doing something - it’s that she’d forgotten that Kyle existed as a concept. And seeing him taller and a _farm consultant_ and still tripping over everything it’s possible to trip over and then some is throwing even her off balance. 

“I was coming to deliver this,” Kyle says, handing the notebook that Scorpia had kicked towards him back to Scorpia. “My update for the Council on the soil pollution and crop expansion.”

“Oh! Thanks. I definitely remembered that I’m supposed to present that,” Scorpia says. 

Kyle turns to Adora and Catra, who at some point stepped a little closer to Adora. “It’s so great to see you guys!”

“Really?” Catra says, making Adora want to slap a hand over her face and groan. Some situations still bring out her worst instincts, and honestly, Adora isn’t that surprised that the sudden appearance of Kyle is one of them. 

“You all clearly have a lot of catching up to do, so I’ll just-” Scorpia flees before finishing the sentence. 

That’s enough time for Catra’s biting remark to dissolve from the air - all three of them have ample practice carrying on as though everything is fine. There’s something uncomfortable about how easy it still is, how natural it feels to see Kyle smile again instead of taking offense or rising to Catra’s bait. 

“You should come over for lunch,” Kyle says instead. “Our place is close by, it doesn’t have to be for too long if you need to get back.”

“We’d love to,” Adora says, feeling Catra’s piercing glare against the side of her head before she even says it. She doesn’t care, though - she wants to be the kind of person who meets her old squadmates for lunch. She wants to strip away everything the Horde took from them all and find out if there’s anything underneath. If all it becomes is one painfully awkward afternoon, she at least wants to know. 

Kyle’s smile is steady. “Great! Follow me.” 

* * *

The farm Kyle leads them to is beautiful. There’s a small house nestled next to a larger barn, and fields sprawl out past both. Adora feels like she can see all of Aridia from here, houses and farmland and orchards and the silos and water towers that the people here built out of the scrap metal left over from the Fright Zone. 

Kyle opens the door to the house, which isn’t locked, and leads them inside. 

Catra is tense enough that it occurs to Adora that maybe she ought to have asked her before accepting Kyle’s invitation. Of the two of them, Adora isn’t the one who has the most complicated history with Kyle and...whoever he meant when he said “our.” When Catra catches Adora looking, though, she manages to summon a hint of a smile. 

“I’m back! And I brought friends,” Kyle calls into the house. 

Catra’s ears flick and she tenses, which is all the warning Adora has before Hordak’s little blue flying nightmare comes barreling around the corner toward them. Catra hisses and leaps behind Adora, who reaches for her hand. 

The flying thing doesn’t get anywhere near them, though, before Kyle snags it out of the air and wrestles it to his chest as if it’s an actual baby and not some kind of Hordak-demon-clone situation. It looks exactly the same as Adora remembers, other than the fact that it hasn’t scratched Kyle’s eyes out yet and is letting Kyle coax its hand up to wave at them. 

“I wasn’t planning on starting with Imp,” Kyle says with a sheepish grin. 

Just then, there’s the noise of a door opening on the other side of the house. Catra tightens her hold on Adora’s hand but steps up next to her, squaring her shoulders as if they’re about to step into battle. 

Rogelio _and_ Lonnie appear beside Kyle in the hallway and look over the two of them. “Seriously, Kyle?” Lonnie says, sounding exactly the same as she always has. Adora can’t help but grin. 

When Lonnie walks closer, it feels natural to shake Catra off to hug her while Catra exchanges an awkward fistbump with Rogelio. Lonnie accepts the hug a little guardedly, and as they break apart Adora is wracking her mind for any memory of ever hugging Lonnie before. Adora had hugged all her teammates when they were upset, but Lonnie never got upset. Or at least when she did, she hid it behind an unbreachable wall of anger. 

She’s smiling now, though, as she slips around Rogelio to appraise Catra. After a few seconds of sizing each other up, Lonnie sticks her hand out to shake and after another tense second, Catra takes it. 

Rogelio wraps an arm around Adora and they all follow Kyle and Imp further into the house. They end up in a kitchen that’s crowded with the five of them, but Adora finds that she doesn’t mind the closeness. 

Rogelio puts a casual hand on Kyle’s back to get his attention and Kyle doesn’t flinch, like Adora would have expected from what she remembers, as he looks up at him. Rogelio says something quietly to Kyle and then turns and starts pulling things out of cupboards. “Rogelio’s going to whip up something for lunch, and we can give you a tour in the meantime,” Kyle says. 

“That sounds great,” Adora replies. 

Kyle leads them out the side door Lonnie and Rogelio must have come in through. Lonnie follows him and holds the door open for Adora and Catra. 

Once they’re out in the open air, Imp blows a raspberry in Kyle’s ear. “Is it okay if I let him go?” he asks, struggling now that Imp is actively wriggling to get free. 

He’s asking Catra, and Adora turns toward her to get a read on her mood. She hasn’t said anything since they got here, and Adora can tell that she’s steeling herself for something. 

Catra waits until all eyes are on her and she can’t pretend that Kyle’s question was aimed at anyone else before speaking. “What do you care what I think?”

Adora resists the urge to beg her to walk it back. She knows that of everyone on Etheria, their squad can handle Catra when she’s at her most abrasive. Besides, she can tell that Catra needs to do this and see how they respond before she’ll relax even a little around them. 

“He obviously freaked you out, and we can all understand why.” Kyle forces an awkward laugh, which does little to dispel the tension between the four of them. “I’m sure you’ve noticed that this isn’t the Fright Zone. If you’d prefer I keep ahold of him, it’s okay.” 

Catra glares at them silently until Lonnie lets out an exasperated sigh and rolls her eyes. “Catra, just answer the question.” 

Catra’s eyes dart between Kyle and Lonnie and Imp, the house and the barn, and the swathe of open sky above them. “You can let him go,” she finally says. 

When Kyle does, Imp immediately flies over to land on all fours on Catra’s head. Catra tenses but remarkably doesn’t swat him off. “Let him go!” he says in Catra’s voice before flapping away. 

“You’ve made him nicer,” Adora says, genuinely astonished. 

Lonnie chuckles. “We took him to Dryl one time, to see if Hordak wanted him back.”

“After he bit me,” Kyle adds, holding up a hand with an impressive toothmark scar on the back. 

“Hordak seemed surprised that Imp was still around, and then Entrapta started telling us way more about surveillance robots than we ever wanted to know, and we kinda took that as permission to keep him.”

After all this time, it’s strange to hear Lonnie say “Hordak” without “Lord” in front of it. Adora wonders if it still feels strange to her.

“But...why?” Catra asks. 

Lonnie smirks. “That was all Kyle.”

“He’s a baby! A weird demon-clone baby, but still,” Kyle says. “He needed us.” 

“He brings us great gossip about the neighbors,” Lonnie adds.

“This is my workshop,” Kyle says, pulling open the tall barn doors. Inside is a collection of vehicles that have clearly been modified from Horde materials, stacks of other equipment, and an entrance into a glass-walled room, which he walks towards. “Well, technically this is everyone’s workshop. _This_ is my workshop.”

He pushes open the door. It’s warmer inside, and through the glass wall Adora can see the fields in front of them. On the benches throughout the room are tiny plants in tiny pots, meticulously labeled and organized. 

“The Fright Zone really messed up the land around here,” Kyle says, gently brushing a finger against a plant that has unhealthy yellow-looking leaves. “When we first settled here, I started doing experiments - seeing which crops could grow, what I might be able to do to improve the soil.” 

“According to Entrapta he’s improved the land productivity by some bonkers percentage,” Lonnie says. 

Kyle shrugs. “It’s nice to feel useful.”

Lonnie shows them some of the farming equipment, including some ex-tanks that she and Rogelio modified to spread seeds, and then they walk back toward the house. It smells delicious inside, and Adora finds herself hanging back awkwardly with Catra as the other three step around each other to get food and plates on the table. 

“This is great,” Catra says around her first mouthful of whatever Rogelio’s made. 

“Beats ration bars,” Kyle says, and for a full ten seconds it’s silent. Catra doesn’t build on the joke, which really wasn’t a joke at all, and Adora doesn’t blatantly change the subject. This whole afternoon, it’s felt a little like they’re on the rickety old watchtower she and Catra has always climbed up to be alone in the Fright Zone. It had rattled in the wind and creaked at every step, and every so often Adora would wonder if this was the time it would finally come crumbling down around her. 

What they’d all been to each other as kids hadn’t been built to last. It’s going to shake apart. And Adora doesn’t know these versions of her teammates well enough to be able to tell if they’re going to be able to rebuild. 

“So, you still living at Bright Moon?” Kyle asks, after the eternity it takes for even him to notice the awkwardness. 

“Sort of. We’ve been traveling a lot,” Adora says. “What about you? Why Aridia?”

Lonnie snorts. “You don’t know?”

Adora opens her mouth to defend herself, but Kyle interrupts. “Scorpia was the only Princess who let ex-Horde soldiers live in her kingdom from the beginning, no questions asked. Pretty much everyone who didn’t get as far away as possible right after Hordak and Catra got kidnapped is still here.” 

“You left,”Catra says, a touch of danger in her voice. 

“Of course we left,” Lonnie says. “But where were we supposed to go? Bright Moon? Plumeria?” 

“Some people did,” Adora says. 

Lonnie shrugs. “We didn't want to change to fit in somewhere else. So we made this place change for us.”

* * *

Adora realizes that she’s lost track of Catra, too absorbed in listening to Kyle and Rogelio tell her about the vegetables that don’t grow anywhere but Aridia while they wash dishes, when the yelling starts. 

Lonnie raises her voice first, but Adora suspects the argument has been escalating for about as long as she and Catra have been alone together. “Who knows what would have happened if you’d actually _trusted us_ ,” she says. 

Catra, not surprisingly, rises to the bait. “You were supposed to be my friends, and all you did was rub it in my face that without Adora you didn’t want me around at all!”

“Do you remember what you were like, back then Catra? You cried yourself to sleep and then used the Force Captain badge to make us do whatever you wanted. You didn’t want _friends_.”

Adora turns to go into the other room to intervene, but she’s stopped by Rogelio’s hand landing on her shoulder. 

She trades a glance with Kyle, who looks like he also wants to put a stop to it. “I _think_ we can trust them to not actually attack each other?” he says, sounding less and less sure as the sentence goes on. Adora gets it — if an argument had gone on this long in the Fright Zone, one of them would likely have tackled the other by now. Adora has to remind herself that the Horde is behind all of them just as much as it’s behind her.

“Of course I wanted friends!” Catra is saying. “I at least wanted you to be on my side instead of reminding me at every turn that I was totally alone.”

“If you’d given the impression that you cared about us even a little, I wouldn’t have _had to_.” It’s quiet for long enough for Adora to consider barging into the room with a joke or a distraction, then Lonnie speaks again, quieter this time. “For us, it felt like we lost two squadmates that day. You didn’t care if using your new power put us in danger. You didn’t try to change anything, like Adora would have. You became another person the rest of us had to protect ourselves from.”

“I...never thought of it that way. It’s not like I wanted to hurt _you_. It was just…”

“Scary to care? I know. Believe me when I say I _know._ ”

“When _you_ took every opportunity to push me around and threaten me it was!” 

“It was never because of who you are, Catra. It was because of how you acted. If you’d asked us for help or even talked about how much you missed her instead of bringing out your claws every time she came up, I would’ve acted different too.”

Adora flinches. She hadn’t actually considered what things had been like in her old bunkroom after she’d left, and even after years it stings to think about the hurt she’d caused. 

“Okay...I’m sorry.” Catra says it begrudgingly and for a second Adora thinks that Lonnie might keep laying into her for _that_ , but Lonnie’s next words are quiet. 

“I’m sorry, too. I thought, back before, that everything would be better if you’d just learn to be a better soldier, and then you finally did, and that’s when I realized I had to leave the Horde.”

Catra laughs. “Well for what it’s worth, I’m glad you made it out okay.”

“It’s worth a lot, actually. And...same to you.”

Suddenly are footsteps coming toward them from the other room. Rogelio yanks Adora around so it looks like they’re all deep in conversation, and Kyle starts babbling “So, I, yeah, you know, huh. Oh, hey Lonnie, hey Catra.” 

“Idiots,” Lonnie says. Catra sidles up next to Adora and takes her hand. She smiles when Adora looks over at her, a little less tense than before. 

“I want to ask you all something,” Adora says. Catra’s thumb strokes over the back of her hand, making her realize that she’s tightened her grip. “When I left...would you have come with me, if I’d asked?” 

Catra had been too angry to consider it, but Kyle had never fit in there at all, and Rogelio could have been a better soldier than all of them but he’d never seemed to care one way or the other how well he did in simulations, and Lonnie had succeeded at all the Horde had asked of her, but she’d never been happy. 

“No,” Kyle says, as if it’s an answer to a simple question. “I would have been too scared.”

Rogelio wraps an arm around Kyle’s shoulders with a grunt. 

“I thought we were going to win,” Lonnie says, looking down. “Took me way too long to figure out what was up.” 

A knot in Adora’s chest loosens. She should have been a better friend back then, but hearing it now still helps. “It’s really good to see you all again.” 

Kyle opens his mouth to reply, but it turns into a shriek when Imp flies in through the window and lands on his head. Kyle’s flailing catches a corner of the rack they’ve just set all the drying dishes on, sending it crashing to the floor and breaking everything on it into dozens of tiny pieces. 

“ _Kyle,”_ Lonnie says in that exasperated way that still makes Adora think _home_ . She doubles over laughing at the improbable but so characteristically _Kyle_ spectacle, and after a moment the rest of them join in. 

“You should visit again,” Lonnie says, once the broken plates have been cleaned up and Adora and Catra are getting ready to leave. 

“If you can handle the Princess cooties, you should visit Bright Moon sometime,” Catra says. 

“Hey, there is nothing I can’t handle,” Lonnie says, then she folds Catra into what looks like only a minimally awkward hug. 

“Thanks for never putting up with my shit,” Catra says as they break apart. 

“Oh, you’re very welcome.”

It’s strange to say goodbye, and Adora doesn’t quite realize why until Rogelio closes the door behind them - she’s never said goodbye to her squadmates before, not really. They’d been around each other for most of every day for their entire childhoods, and then she’d ditched the Fright Zone in the middle of the night while they slept and when they’d met again, they’d been enemies. 

It might have been the first time, but Adora decides then and there to make sure that it isn’t the last. It’s okay if this future means more fights and awkward silences and goodbyes, because everything else is worth it. Because despite everything, all of them are happy. All of them have won. 

**Author's Note:**

> I haven’t been great about responding to comments because for some reason comment replies specifically fill me with anxiety, but I always treasure them! 💕


End file.
